GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 1788-1824

For many of his contemporaries in England, Europe, and America, Byron was the embod­iment of the Romantic spirit, both in his poetry and in his personal life. Proud, pas­sionate, rebellious, deeply marked by pain­ful and often mysterious experiences in the past, yet fiercely and defiantly committed to following his own individual destiny — this was the image that Byron created for his contemporaries and passed on to subse­quent ages.

George Gordon Noel Lord Byron was born on January 22, 1788. He belonged to an old aristocratic but impoverished family. Byron had a congenital deformity: he was lame; and this was a cause of distress with the poet all his life. Byron struggled all his life with the physical and psychological effects of his de­formity. He was especially proud of his ath­letic prowess at swimming, riding, boxing, and cricket, and of his good looks, which he was always fearful of losing.

Byron was descended from two aristocratic but violent and undisciplined families. His father, a reckless English sea captain and fortune hunter, was called “Mad Jack” By­ron; his mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, came from a line of fiery-tempered, lawless Scottish nobles. Byron was born in London but at the age of three, shortly after his father died, he was taken by his mother to Aberdeen, Scotland where he was brought up in the strict religious environment of Scottish Presbyterianism*.

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*Presbyterianism — system of Christian protestant church government, expounded during the Reformation by John Calvin, which gives its name to be established Church of England, and is also practised in England, Wales, Ireland, Switzerland, North America, and elsewhere. There is no com­pulsory form of worship and each congregation is governed by presbyters or elders (clerical or lay), who are of equal rank.

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In Aberdeen the boy attended a day school followed by a course in the grammar school.

When Byron was ten years old, his great uncle, known as the “Wicked Lord” died, and Byron inherited his title to become the sixth Lord Byron. Byron was also heir to the ancestral estate, Newstead Abbey.

On his return to England in 1798, Byron studied for four years at Harrow College. In 1805, he entered Cambridge University. It was at Cambridge that Byron began to write poetry, and to assume a flamboyant, outrageous style of life that would become his trademark. He spent much of the mon­ey he inherited on expensive clothes and dec­orations for his college rooms; he enter­tained lavishly; he kept horses and a pet bear; and he loved to shock his friends by drinking out a cup made from a human skull. In 1807, Byron published his lyric poems in a small volume called Hours of Idleness. The volume was sharply attacked in the influential Edinburgh Review, and Byron responded with his first important poem, a biting satire in the 18th century manner, called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

In 1809, after graduating from Cambridge, Byron set out with a close friend on an extended tour of countries not immediately in­volved in the Napoleonic Wars: Spain, Por­tugal, Albania, Greece, Asia Minor. He used the experiences of his journey as the basis for the first two cantos of a marvelous poetic trav­elogue entitled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he published soon after his return to England in 1812. The work was enormously successful. As Byron himself recalled, “I awoke one morning and found myself fa­mous”.

On February 27, 1812 Byron delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords at the second reading of the Frame-breakers Bill*

He spoke very passionately. He became the greatest literary and social celebrity of Regency London. His reputation grew still further with the publication of a series of Romantic verse narratives with exotic, Near-Eastern settings: The Giaour, The Cor­sair, and Lara.

The appeal of these poems lay only partly in their descriptions of foreign scenes and customs. In them, and in the verse dramas a few years later, Byron created the figure subsequently known as the “Byroniсhero” a passionate, moody, restless character who has exhausted most of the world’s excite­ments, and who lives under the weight of some mysterious sin committed in the past. His proud, defiant individualism refuses to be limited by the normal institutional and moral strictures of society. He is an “out­sider” whose daring life both isolates him and makes him attractive. Most of Byron’s readers identified him personally with his heroes. And despite his protests that such connections should never be taken serious­ly, it seems clear that Byron partly enjoyed the identity, at least at the beginning of his career, and sometimes tried to project it in his own behaviour.

During his travels and after return to Lon­don Byron wrote a great number of lyrical pieces. The most significant of them is his cycle of Hebrew Melodies (1915).

In 1815, at the height of his popularity, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, who sought to make him into a conventional and respectable husband. But Byron was soon involved in bitter quarrels with his wife over his unconventional behaviour and his continuing love affairs. When she left him after only a year of marriage, Byron found himself surrounded by scandal and ostracized by the very society that had made him its favourite. Bitter, but defiant as always, Byron left England on April 25, 1816, and was never to return.

Byron resumed his travels in Europe, living first at Geneva in Switzerland, where he became close friends with Shelley* and where he produced a magnificent third canto of Childe Harold.

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* Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822) — an English poet.

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Then he moved to Venice, where he perpetuated his reputation for fast living and began his greatest work, the sa­tirical epic Don Juan. Byron’s hero is not, as we would expect, the adult Don Juan, the notorious lover who would seem to lie clos­est to Byron’s own personality and to that of his earlier “Byronic heroes.” He is rather an original version of the boyish and youth­ful Don Juan, a fresh, energetic, impression­able young man whose curiosity and attrac­tiveness to women enable Byron to expose both the foolishness and cruelty of life and the wonderful richness of earthy experience. Byron himself makes his presence felt in Don Juan primarily through the voice of the nar­rator, who appears to be making up his poem as he goes along and who recounts the ad­ventures of Don Juan (a younger version of himself) with a splendid balance of satire and sympathy.

Byron eventually went to Pisa where he again joined Shelley, who was living there among a small circle of friends. After Shel­ley’s death and the breakup of the “Pisan Circle,” Byron again grew restless.

Always an ardent spokesman for political freedom, he saw Greece, the ancient home of democracy, struggling to win its inde­pendence from Turkey. He invested a great deal of money and energy in organizing an expedition, which he himself led, to help the Greek cause. While training troops in the squalid, marshy town of Missolonghi, he was stricken with a severe fever. Byron died on April 19, 1824, shortly after his 36th birthday. Although his practical con­tribution to the Greek army was insignifi­cant, his presence and tragic death produced a vital spark of inspiration for the eventual liberation of the country. He is still regard­ed in Greece as a national hero.

As a man Byron was capable of many moods and many roles, and we can see this reflected in the variety of his poetry. But behind all the different roles and postures we sense that powerful, self-conscious personality that holds as much fascination for us today as it did for Byron’s own era.